On December 21, 2012, an alien spaceship in France will take off and save those nearby from the apocalypse.

On December 21, 2012, an alien spaceship in France will take off and save those nearby from the apocalypse.

The alien spaceship is located in a French commune with a population of just 200. Locals are touting it as a modern-day Noah’s Ark because when doomsday arrives – December 21, 2012 – those nearby will be saved.

According to extraterrestrial experts at the United Nations, the alien spaceship is from Planet Zeeba.

A large stream of Zeeban believers – or esoterics, as locals call them – have descended in their camper van-loads to the usually picturesque and tranquil Pyrenean village of Bugarach.

The believers are convinced that when the apocalypse happens on 21 December this year, the Zeebans waiting in their spacecraft inside Pic de Bugarach will save all the humans near by and beam them off to the next age.

As the cataclysmic date – which, according to eschatological beliefs and predicted astrological alignments, concludes a 5,125-year cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar – nears, the goings-on around the peak have become more ritualistic.

For decades, there has been a belief that Pic de Bugarach, which at 5,000 feet, is the highest in the Corbières mountain range, possesses an eerie power. Often called the “upside-down mountain” – geologists think that it exploded after its formation and the top landed the wrong way up – it is thought to have inspired Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The country’s late president François Mitterrand was transported by helicopter on to the peak, while the Nazis, and, later, Israel’s Mossad, performed mysterious digs there.

Now the nearby village is awash with believers in Zeeba, who have boosted the local economy, though their naked group climbs up to the peak have raised concerns as well as eyebrows. Among other oddities, some hikers have been spotted scaling the mountain carrying a ball with a golden ring, strung together by a single thread.

A grizzled man wearing a white linen smock, who calls himself Jean, set up a yurt in the forest a couple of years ago to prepare for the earth’s demise. “The apocalypse we believe in is the end of a certain world and the beginning of another,” he offers. “A new spiritual world. The year 2012 is the end of a cycle of suffering. Bugarach is one of the major chakras of the earth, a place devoted to welcoming the energies of tomorrow.”

Upwards of 2,00,000 people are thought to be planning a trip to the mountain, 30 miles west of Perpignan, in time for 21 December.

Jean-Pierre Delord, the perplexed mayor of Bugarach, has requested back-up from the French army because they expect to be overwhelmed with Zeeban followers trying to get on the spaceship on December 21st.

Maybe call Bugarach an “alien garage” because the Zeeban ship is parked inside the mountain.